THE PERPETUAL-CRISIS MACHINE OF THE APOPOLYPTIC LEFT
Don Feder
The left is in crisis-overdrive. Imminent disaster is its rallying cry.
The world will end, if we dont appropriate billions, launch another
massive government program, shower condoms on 6-year-olds, socialize another sector of the economy,
cede more of our freedom to Washington, and venerate the polar bears.
Since at least the early 1960s, the left has been in a constant state
of agitation, prophesying doom at every turn. Any who question its hysteria-mongering
are labeled antiscience, a tool of corporate interests, insensitive or
just plain Republican.
The refrain is always the same: Dont question. Dont examine
the evidence too closely. Dont debate the proposals. Whatever you
do, dont read the legislation before you vote. Just give us what
we want, or civilization, as we know it, will cease to exist, millions
will die horrible deaths and it will be your fault. Like its progenitor,
Karl Marx, the left is always wrong often hilariously so.
On September 24, 2008, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (to speak of a Kennedy scion
from the low end of the gene pool implies theres another end), in
a commentary for the Los Angeles Times, pointed to recent mild winters
in the D.C. area (anemic he called them) as conclusive evidence
of global warming. Junior disclosed, Once, my father, Atty. Gen.
Robert Kennedy, brought a delegation of visiting Eskimos home
for
lunch. They spent the afternoon building a great igloo in the deep snow
of our back yard. Yet, in the face of irrefutable evidence of lack
of igloo-building, Exxon Mobil and its carbon cronies continue to
pour money into think tanks whose purpose is to deceive the American public
into believing that global warming is a fantasy. Kennedys know a
lot about deceiving the American public.
Meanwhile, the blizzard from which Washingtonians just dug out surpassed
the record snowfall of 1899. At one point, Dulles Airport reported that
72 inches had fallen. The response of the apocalyptic left? Well, we told
you global warming will result in extreme weather conditions. You see,
mild winters prove global warming as do severe winters. Any questions?
Karl Marx was the original progressive doom-andgloomer. In the mid-19th
century, Marx (who never set foot in a factory or met a blue-collar worker)
confidently predicted the crisis of capitalism the
rich would keep getting richer, while the proletariat would have children,
until, on the verge of starvation, the latter would throw off their chains
in a worldwide revolution. Instead of poverty, the proletariat got collective
bargaining, employer-paid health insurance, and comfortable pensions. Workers
of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your 401-k plans.
It wasnt quite a straight line from The Communist Manifesto
to Rachel Carsons The Silent Spring (1962). The Al Gore
of her day, Rachel warned of environmental catastrophe from the widespread
use of DDT to control the mosquitos that spread malaria. Considered the
mother of the environmentalist movement, Rachel was responsible for the 30-year
ban on DDT, finally lifted by the World Health Organization in 2006. Her book
claimed the compound caused cancer in humans and genetic damage to birds and
beneficial insects all based on anecdotal evidence and rats doing laps
in vats of DDT. In 1981, Rachel Carson got a commemorative U.S. postage stamp.
Millions in the Third World especially pregnant women and children
got early deaths from malaria, which DDT had largely eliminated by the mid-60s.
From The Silent Spring to An Inconvenient Truth"
and beyond, its been a steady march of hysteria, manufactured statistics
and speculation totally detached from reality. Stroll down memory lane
and meet the ghosts of liberal crises past.
The Homeless The homelessness crisis suddenly
appeared in the early 80s, conveniently, just as the left was looking
for an emotional way to indict Reaganomics. Supposedly, millions of homeless
wandered the streets of our cities, pushing shopping carts, sleeping on
heating grates and mooching change. Shelters were filled to capacity.
Rising unemployment, lack of affordable housing and the disappearance
of the proverbial safety net were to blame, liberals charged. We were
all just a few steps away from the streets, they told us. Mitch Snyder,
self-anointed advocate for pavement people (Martin Sheen played him in
a made-for-T.V. movie Samaritan: The Mitch Snyder Story),
informed an evercredulous media that there were 3 million homeless, a
statistic he later admitted making up.
In a campus address, Snyder, who committed suicide in 1990, tearfully
told us that in America, 45 homeless people die every second. That would
mean 1.4 billion (four times the total U.S. population) expire annually,
and then are resurrected to die again the following year. P.J. ORourke
once wrote that if you put all of the homeless in affordable housing,
half are so crazy theyd jump out the windows and the other half
would sell the plumbing for drugs or booze. According to one study, between
65% and 85% of the homeless are mentally ill, alcoholics, addicts, or
a combination thereof. We were all just a few cases of Thunderbird or
a psychotic episode away from the streets.
The AIDS Epidemic Discovered about the same time as the
homeless crisis, the dread contagion wasnt a gay disease, we were
assured on the theory that, if it was, we wouldnt care enough.
Everyone was susceptible. If we didnt spend billions pronto, AIDS
would sweep the nation like wildfire. Now No One Is Safe From AIDS,
screeched the cover of Life magazine. It was worse than the Black Plague,
a Joe Biden speech and daytime television combined. Then-Surgeon
General C. Everett Koop (who was co-opted by the AIDS lobby) forecast
a heterosexual AIDS explosion. Oprah said that by 1990, 20%
of all heterosexuals would be dead from AIDS. Clintons HHS Secretary
Donna Shalala said AIDS may leave nobody left. These projections
were delusional, to put it mildly.
According to The Centers for Disease Control, in 2007, 14,561 died from
AIDS not much of a mega-plague, when compared to 631,636 deaths
from heart disease, 559,888 from cancer and 137,119 from stroke in the
same year. A 1988 New York Times story (Researchers List Odds of
Getting AIDS in Heterosexual Intercourse) gave away the game. According
to the paper, which never misses a chance to proselytize for the gay agenda,
the chances of
contracting AIDS from a single act of heterosexual intercourse
with an infected partner and without a condom --were 1 in 500. No one
was safe from AIDS no one who was gay, bisexual or into sharing
(needles).
The National Epidemic of Hate Crimes The late Sen. Edward
Kennedy called hate crimes domestic terrorism thereby
suggesting that they were just as much a threat to our nations security
as al-Qaeda, Taliban, Hezbollah and every jihad-preaching imam around
the world. Neo-Nazis, Ku-Kluxers and freelance haters were roaming our
streets looking for victims on which to inflict their vile animus. The
alleged epidemic led to the passage last year of The Matthew Shepard and
James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, which added sexual orientation
to the category of protected classes.
Just how much of a hate-crimes crisis there is may be seen from the FBI
Uniform Crime Reports. (The FBI is required to compile statistics of so-called
bias offenses.) According to the UCR, in 2007, there were 16,929 murders
and over 855, 000 cases of aggravated assault in the United States. There
were also a grand total of 7,624 hate crimes of all kinds motivated
by race, religion, ethnicity, sexuality, whatever. Of that number, 78%
involved either intimidation (words alone), or simple assault (no serious
injury occurred), which included pushing and shoving. In 2007, 9 murders
were classified as hate crimes which constituted .0005 % of total
homicides. Your chances of being the victim of a hate crime any
hate crime are comparable to being struck by lightening twice while
bungee-jumping on Groundhog Day. For this, we abrogated the First Amendments
Free Speech clause.
Global WarmingTo justify spending trillions of dollars, drastically
altering our way of life and wrecking our economy with idiocies like Cap
and Trade, in An Inconvenient Truth, Gore forecast that the
sea level could rise by as much as 20 feet, due to melting polar ice caps.
Even, the U.N.s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, run by
the global-warming alarmists, was more modest predicting that sea
levels would rise 17 inches by 2100. Besides his Oscar, Gore deserved
a Nebula Award for science fiction writing.
Dr. Nils-Axel Morner, a Swedish geologist and physicist who formerly headed
the International Commission onSea Level Change, says that, despite fluctuations,
the sea level has not risen in the past 50 years. And if there
is any change in this century, it will not be more than 10 cm (4
inches), with an uncertainty of plus or minus 10 cm. The mainstream
media would call Dr. Morner a global-warming denier. Still,
Gores forecast could come to pass. If the 1.4 billion homeless who
die in America every year each had a burial at sea
..
Over-population The world was overpopulated
in 1798, when Thomas Malthus wrote Principles of Population
and planet earth contained less than a billion people. In his tract, Malthus
predicted mass starvation in the coming century. Instead, we got the Industrial
Revolution and the greatest expansion of material well-being in history.
The world was overpopulated in 1968, when there were 3.63 billion on earth
and Paul Ehrlich wrote The Population Bomb, in which he predicted
mass starvation in the 1970s and thus joined the ranks of Malthus
and Marx as a prophet of dumb.
Today, the worlds population is 6.8 billion. Its been said
that you could fit everyone currently on earth into Texas, and theyd
have 1,000 sq. feet of living space. If those quarter are too tight, you
could send them all to Brazil, where they'd each have three acres. If
starvation and overcrowding wont do the trick, how
about climate change? Now, its argued that a growing population
increases carbon fuel consumption, depletes the ozone layer and
aaaaarah! Were all going to die! Thus, the left has one of its newest
myths (global warming) driving one of its oldest myths (overpopulation).
The Health Insurance Crisis In his State of the Union address,
Barack Obama warned, By the time Im finished speaking
.
more Americans (45 a second?) will have lost their health insurance.
Millions will lose it this year. Plus, (you guessed it) were
all just a job away from being one ofthe health insurance-less. Obama
and the Democrats are wedded to the figure 46 million for the number of
uninsured in America. For a change, the stat comes from a reliable source,
the U.S. Census Bureau. But this is a snapshot of a point in time. It
does not mean that 46 million Americans are uninsured over the course
of a year. It also doesnt tell us why theyre uninsured. (Some
are between jobs.) The same data shows that 38% of the uninsured earn
more than $50,000 a year and 9.1 million earn more than
$75,000. They could afford health insurance. Many are young and healthy
and willing to gamble the cost of insurance against the prospect of a
serious illness.
Another 14 million qualify for government programs that theyre not
currently using. And almost 10 million arent U.S. citizens. Obama
swears on a stack of Korans theyll never get federally mandated
health insurance. The chronically uninsured are about 8 million, in a
population of 305 million. For this were expected to turn
the best health-care system in the world over to the politicians and bureaucrats
who gave us sub-prime mortgages, $1,000 toilet seats and the U.S. Postal
Service and get rationing, death panels, and federally funded abortion
in the process.
If they were honest, liberals would confess: Theres a severe
power crisis in this country. When it comes to power over your own life,
you have too much and we have too little. Please help us to rectify this
situation. Of course, that would get them nowhere. Hence, the lefts
perpetual-crisis machine apocalypse now. Unless you let us do something
drastic right away, you could get AIDS, end up homeless, lose your health
insurance, see your beachfront property under 20 feet of water, and watch
as beach towels are airlifted to the Eskimos."
Goebbels wouldnt have the gall to concoct the lies theyve
been peddling for half a century. But more than a power grab is involved.
The left hates the middle-class, hates private property and hates limited,
constitutional government. It wants to make us feel guilty for what we
have. Whatever the crisis, ultimately, its our
fault its our greed, stupidity, callousness or bigotry that
fuels the catastrophe.
In the movie The Invention of Lying, Ricky Gervais lives in a world where
everyone tells the absolute truth. The protagonist becomes the first person
to intentionally tell a lie. (Could the invention of liberals be far behind?)
To see how much he can get away with, in one memorable scene, Gervais
approaches a beautiful woman on the street and tells her, If we
dont have sex right now, the world will end. She responds,
Do we have time to go to a motel, or do we have to do it here?
That's the way liberal crisis-mongers operate Let us seduce you,
right now, or the world will end. (END)
KENYA PRESSURED ON ABORTION
World Congress of Families Communications Director, Don Feder urged the
voters of Kenya not to abandon the unborn by adopting language that would
facilitate abortion in the draft of a new constitution. Feder noted that
the draft constitution, currently adopted by the Kenyan legislature, has
contradictory provisions: "On the one hand, Section 26 states that
every person has a right to life, and that life begins at conception.
However, this is totally negated by the next section, which allows abortion
when, in the 'opinion of a trained health professional (not necessarily
a physician), there is need for emergency treatment, or the life or health
of the mother is in danger, or if permitted by any other written law.'"
Groups like the Center for Reproductive Rights are urging Secretary of
State Hillary Rodham Clinton to push this abortion loophole on Kenya --
not that she needs much urging. Feder countered: "An exception to
a ban on abortion for the 'health of the mother' is virtually abortion-on-
demand. You can always find an obliging 'health professional' -- including
mental-health workers -- who will certify that any condition would endanger
a woman's health unless a pregnancy is terminated. That's the way mother's-health
exceptions work in the United States, and why pro-lifers have fought them
so hard. Abortion does more to jeopardize a mother's health (including
making her more susceptible to breast cancer) than does carrying a child
to term. Feder addressed the June 2009 World Congress of Families
Dialogue of Civilizations in Abuja, Nigeria, and the "Media And The
Common Good" conference in Nairobi. "Wherever I've traveled
in Africa, local leaders have told me they resented the attempts of Western
elites to subvert the family values which are the foundation of traditional
African culture," Feder disclosed
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